Our secret language

Come over here, I say to my son in Italian. Stay close.

He comes; he knows both the words and the tone of my voice.  I started using my family's ancestral language here and there when he was very young, and he understands several words and phrases, even though he rarely speaks them himself.

The first time he said I love you was in Italian, and it sounded like music.  

I am not fluent; in fact, I probably speak more fluent French than Italian, but I want my son to understand some of the key phrases I used as a child.  I search my memory for the words my grandmother used with us.  When we were all together, we had our private jokes that made no sense to anyone else, since we told them in broken Sicilian slang.  I have never seen these words in print except for maybe some of the more common words, and I don’t know how to spell them.  

It is our shared secret language.

I’m afraid I’m losing it; as best as I can, I try to keep these traditions alive.  

My mother and I still sometimes use particular phrases when we are together, but I rarely see my extended family – my grandmother’s surviving sisters and my cousins – because we live across the country from them.  Certain memories will trigger certain words, and I still swear in Italian to myself if I am frustrated or angry.

My son never met my grandmother, as she passed away almost fourteen years ago, and that is a terrible loss.  As life would have it, I waited until I was almost 39 to have my son, and the downside of that is that he never met three out of four of his great-grandparents.  Our family generations are squeezed to the top to accommodate my late motherhood.  

My son, now four, has a friend who is American by birth, of parents born and raised in Russia.  He speaks Russian at home with his parents and his Ukrainian nanny, and speaks only a smattering of English.  And yet, he and my son adore each other and communicate with ease for a set of children speaking different languages. Perhaps because they are both learning the nuances of language overall, they rely on hand gestures, nonverbal communication, facial expressions, and the few words they share.  When they are excited, they speak to each other in a mishmash of mixed-language gibberish only they understand, and they laugh knowingly at each other’s jokes.  This is their secret language. 

I think about the slang I use with my friends, with words we have made up or adapted for our own amusement, and the catchphrases that come up regularly in conversation.  And when we are face to face, it takes only a raised eyebrow or a wave of our hand to deliver the message; we are connected and we understand each other’s meaning.

Even via online communication, the sometimes-villain of our generation, we use language that is changeable and dynamic and abbreviated.  We use stickers and emoticons to convey tone.   It is not always easy to understand tone online, and we use these enhancements to ensure that we are not misread.  

I think my son has the right idea – he doesn’t have a phone yet, so he doesn’t have the distractions of social media, email, or texting to muddy the meaning.  He and his small Russian-speaking friend chatter away, without a care of offending each other or misreading; they understand each other perfectly.

As he grows, we’ll develop our own language nuances within our family.  He can already discern my tone of voice and stops what he’s doing at a pointed look.  He understands my hand gestures when we are on the phone with his grandparents telling him to be a little quieter, or to pay attention and be polite.  He also understands how I show him how much I love him.

I asked him, as an exercise from a recordable book, how do you know that mom loves you?  She snuggles with me, he said.  

He concedes to my snuggles, still.  He lets me carry him and cradle his head in my hands and kiss his cheeks.  I show him love as often as possible in these ways because I believe in the power of touch, but also, because I know there will come a day soon when he won’t let me snuggle him to sleep or kiss his cheeks in public.  He won’t want me to tousle his hair or carry him up the stairs.

I’ll have to adapt my language to his age and his moods; I will have to learn how to both show and take in expressions of love without words and without as much snuggling.  At 13, he won’t jump between me and my husband in bed in the middle of the night, or wake me with a smile and an “I love you, Mama,” as he does now.  I will have to learn how to find the meaning between the words and discern what he is telling me with his actions.  I will still tell him "I love you" every day, whether he wants to hear it or not, and I will still reach for him and hug him when I can, for snatches of hugs from a growing boy are precious commodities.

When that day comes, we’ll adapt our secret language and find other ways to communicate.  Because all that matters is that we understand each other: someway, somehow.

Love,